Review: Signia Pure Charge&Go IX Hearing Aids
March 1, 2024 11:00 AM
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Rating:6/10
Solid clarity with minimal hiss. AI assistant can beam programming updates on the fly. Very long battery life.
Professional fitting required, and it took significant tweaking to get a good result. Over-ear design isn’t for everyone. Very expensive, and the company is cagey about pricing.
SIGNIA WAS AN early mover in the in-ear hearing aid world when it released its Active Pro line two years ago, and the industry has continued to evolve dramatically since. While there are plenty more in-ear aids on the market today, Signia’s bread and butter is found in the more traditional side of the hearing aid world, with new behind-the-ear models launching regularly.
The latest of these is the Pure Charge&Go IX. The IX in the name isn’t a Roman number nine but rather shorthand for Integrated Xperience, which Signia claims is “the world’s first hearing tech platform capable of pinpointing multiple conversation partners in real time, providing unprecedented sound clarity and definition for wearers in multi-speaker scenarios.” The company says the IX is built around a wholly new platform focused on optimizing multiparty conversations in noisy environments. The ability to “process speech separate from background sounds,” the company says, means you can still inhabit your environment without overpowering dialog—tracking multiple speakers without the wearer even having to turn their head.
Signia says the hearing aids are so good they improve the listening experience even if you don’t have a hearing impairment. My hearing loss is mild but measurable—and holding steady, based on a new audiogram that was created in the process of writing this review—so I had high hopes that the days of asking for people to repeat themselves, then nodding and smiling when I didn’t catch it the second time, were soon going away.
But first, the fitting. Signia’s Pure Charge&Go IX are not over-the-counter aids and rather require a professional fitting by an audiologist; this can be done online or in person, depending on the physician. I visited a local doctor who took me
